You know the drill: you fill your digital photo frame with your favourite snaps, watch them flash up one after another and suddenly, ugh… an image appears at a different orientation to the rest. Those black boxes at the sides or top, shrinking the detail, or – even worse – a distorted stretch and skew of faces and landscapes.

Yuck.

Luckily for us, Tim shared his rotating digital picture frame, the FlipFrame, on Hackaday, giving us all the chance to solve this very trying issue.

I wanted a nice way to display my digital pictures, but I didn’t want to sacrifice the quality of my vertically oriented pictures. I couldn’t find a rotating digital picture so I made my own. The frame is built on a discarded 27″ LCD TV. The slideshow runs on a Raspberry PI 3.

The frame incorporates both a Raspberry Pi and Arduino, the former hosting the images, and notifying the latter when to rotate the frame smoothly via a stepper motor.

The images are stored on an SD card, Tim’s original plan of importing directly from Google Photos having been hindered by API limitations.

The frame uses a 27” LCD display and speakers, with several 3D-printed and laser-cut parts. Tim has made all files available via Hackaday, along with a component list and brief rundown of how they all fit together.

Have you made something similar? Share your photo frame-based projects with us in the comments below.